A hard landing awaits Ireland after Enda’s Ryanair stunt

AS acts of contrition go, it was as pointless as it was insincere.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny felt our pain by making the ultimate sacrifice — travelling Ryanair.

Well, that was the pre-flight hype anyway, as a bemused public wondered if Enda would splash out on priority boarding or stand stoically in ‘the other Q’ for his flight to Marseilles — would he splurge out on a luggage fee, or could the Taoiseach turn up at the meeting of European centre-right leaders with a battered carry-on bag and some in-flight duty free with which to woo Angela Merkel?

In the end, Kenny travelled with the rather swanky Air France, but considering we are in the middle of a Euro crisis, no one would really have minded him taking the Government jet for such an important gathering, which was not really a party political gig as it set the template for the later gathering in Brussels.

But Kenny felt the need to look like we were all in this together, after snatching with one hand benefits from disabled kids, and demanding with the other a pay-cap busting €35,000 wage rise for one of his old mates in Fine Gael who is now a ministerial flunky.

Kenny also wanted to seem like he was talking tough at the European Union summit, but few people were listening as a belated Government wheeze to claw back €63bn in debts looked unfocused and ill-thought-out.

The very idea of Enda laying down the law to someone like Merkel — even if our Taoiseach was not on his knees with a begging bowl as the only visible means of support — is just risible.

Merkel was an outspoken dissident in the East German city of Leipzig during the Cold War, when none other than Vladimir Putin was in control of the KGB there and directing operations to shut her up.

So, I don’t think a few pleas from Mr Smoothy of Mayo are likely to make her crack.

How, exactly, is this Government supposed to achieve victory abroad when it is its own worst enemy at home?

The budget was a nasty, mean-spirited little thing whose pre-amble, execution and conclusion merely succeeded in cranking-up ill will against the Government.

The disabled, lone parents, pensioners facing hypothermia, and those seeking help with hearing aids were turned over while the chance for bold, radical reform presented to a nation eager for change was lost completely.

The Government has allowed itself to be boxed in between a public sector agreement which, although just two years old, looks like it was written in another era, and a fawning attitude to the cowboy casino money men who got us into this disaster.

Not so much stuck between a rock and a hard place, Kenny and his not-so-merry ministers are trapped between a Croke Park deal and the hard face of grasping bond holders, who are, quite literally, laughing at Ireland all the way to their recapitalised banks.

In the strongest budget debate intervention, Wicklow independent Stephen Donnelly chimed with the national mood by railing against e1.2bn being handed over to Anglo bondholders next month as part of a guarantee to a bank he branded a “dead, criminal organisation.”

Against such a backdrop, it was no wonder Kenny was so terrified of having to bring another EU referendum before an angry Irish populace next spring, even though the prospect of a ‘no’ vote holding-up the limited reforms agreed in Brussels is the only weapon in Dublin’s arsenal when playing with the big guns of Europe.

At his closing press conference yesterday, Kenny kept talking about “the programme” Ireland was in, as if the country was an alcoholic he was trying to wean off the booze. And, indeed, if you look at the fabled 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and replace references to hooch with the word ‘finance’, it does look chillingly familiar.

Step one would read: We admitted we were powerless over finance — that our lives had become unmanageable.

Step 2: Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves (Angela Merkel) could restore us to sanity.

Step 3: Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God (Angela) as we understood Her.

Step 4: Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves (and then farmed it off to that mess NAMA to flog for cheap).

Step 5: Admitted to God (Angela) and ourselves the exact nature of our wrongs.

Step 6: We’re entirely ready to have God (Angela) remove all these defects of character.

Step 7: Humbly asked Her to remove our shortcomings.

Step 8: Made a list of all persons we had harmed (ie: the entire Irish population except a small gang of top politicians and bankers who did very well, thank you) and became willing to make amends to them all.

Step 9: Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others — or when we needed to snatch the benefits off disabled teenagers.

Step 10: Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it (except when getting a e35,000 pay rise for our mates).

Step 11: Sought through prayer meditation, and maybe a bottle of Ryanair duty-free Jameson’s, to improve our conscious contact with God (Angela) as we understood Her, praying only for knowledge of Her will for us and the power to carry that out.

Step 12: Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other bankrupt debt junkies like Greece and Italy, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Ironically, drinkers were the one group spared pain in the Budget.

Its attack on people as vulnerable as the young disabled had extreme conspiracy theorists in Leinster House musing that it was so dumb and cack-handed it must have been done to deflect attention away from other nasty little measures in the package.

But such an idea can easily be dismissed, as it would require a level of political sophistication and organisation well beyond this coalition — as its failure on the European front underscores.

Kenny’s Ryanair stunt failed to take to off at home, and the only shot left in his locker abroad is a ‘no’ vote if the Euro changes require a referendum next May — but for all Enda’s entreaties to view us with kindness and generosity, the reality is that Angela watched in horror as we got drunk on debt and she has little sympathy for our hangover in financial hell now.